


just give me trust and watch what'll happen

by toastweasel



Series: the feeling never fades out my body [3]
Category: Avatar: Legend of Korra
Genre: Beifong Family Feels, Family Bonding, Family Feels, Family Fluff, are you ready for Aunt Lin feels? cuz they are here in spades. I blame cass!, huan doesnt even have a character tag RIP
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-12
Updated: 2020-11-28
Packaged: 2021-03-07 23:08:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,354
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26961931
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toastweasel/pseuds/toastweasel
Summary: Of all of Su's kids, the one nobody saw her bonding with was the introverted, emo artist. But then, in retrospect, it makes perfect sense that she did.Alternatively, a two-shot exploring the bond that occurs between aunt and nibling via the judicious application of sketching and watercolors.
Relationships: Lin Beifong & Huan (Avatar), Lin Beifong & Huan Beifong, Lin Beifong & Suyin Beifong
Series: the feeling never fades out my body [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1918957
Comments: 24
Kudos: 168





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Sometimes you accidentally give yourself Beifong Family Feels and then you write them out and you need others to have feels with you. Oops.
> 
> This fic is part of the "the feeling never fades out of my body" universe, but doesn't really go into anything from those fic so it can be read independently. This fic also relies heavily on my headcanon that Lin watercolors as a hobby, a theme that runs through a lot of my fics. I have no justification for this headcanon other than the fact I like it. If it's not your cup of tea, I'd skip this fanfic. :)
> 
> Loosely beta'd by the amazing Linguini. Much love to her and Cass for fangirling about Aunt Lin with me for hours!<3

Lin stepped off the cable car and made her way into Fire & Ice, a Fire Nation and Water Tribe fusion restaurant in Little Harbor City that Su had picked off a recommendation from a friend. The host led her to a table in the back, where Su was seating, reading the menu and drinking a cocktail.

Her little sister looked up at their approach and brightened at her appearance.

“Lin!”

Su got up and hugged her, which Lin allowed only because she was too busy seeing the table was set for four. As Su pulled away, Lin nodded at the table with a frown. “I thought it was just us.”

“Oh, I hope you don’t mind,” Su said as they sat, waving her hand back and forth airily. “Huan asked to come along on the trip at the last minute since he wanted to see the art museum. Also since I was in the city, I invited Opal to join us.”

“A little warning would be appreciated next time,” Lin grumbled as she, too, sat and immediately reached for her water glass.

“Thanks for agreeing to come get lunch,” Su said, ignoring the jab and nodding at Lin’s uniform. “How long do you have for lunch?”

Lin restrained a grimace. “My secretary cleared my afternoon.”

“Oh, how wonderful! Well—”

Su nattered on about Zaofu, and her husband’s work on his train station, and the state of the Earth Kingdom for the next ten minutes as they waited for Opal and Huan. Lin tried her best to pay attention, but secretly she was cursing her niece and nephew for their tardiness. Thirty years on, even after their reconciliation, and Su’s extroverted tendencies still tended to try her patience.

Opal arrived ten minutes after the hour, full of apologies for her tardiness, her hair and novice robes windswept. She hugged and kissed her mother then bowed respectfully to Lin.

“Aunt Lin, it’s good to see you again,” Opal said as she sat next to her. “I’m sorry I haven’t seen much of you recently.”

“I know airbending training has kept you very busy,” Lin said stiffly, always uncertain when it came to small talk.

“You just returned from the Eastern Air Temple, isn’t that right, Opal?”

“Oh, yes,” Opal said happily, and like her mother launched into the story with full abandon.

Lin sat back in her chair and rested her cheek on her hand as she listened. Opal wasn’t nearly as grating as Su. From all Lin could tell, what with her limited exposure to the man, Opal had her mother’s idealism and her father’s humbleness, which in Lin’s experience with Republic City’s architects was both shocking and incongruous.

But it made sense, she supposed. Two egomaniacs in the same household could only have clashed. Her sister needed someone that could match her bold ideas and personality with calm logic and the ability to actually plan past lunch and follow through. She had found that in her husband, and he had passed it onto their daughter.

“And there’s Huan,” the sister in question said happily as Opal was winding down her stories of the Eastern Air Temple. As he approached the table, Su chided him with a gentle, “Too caught up in the art to remember our lunch date?”

Lin’s nephew had the decency to look slightly embarrassed, but also annoyed by his mother’s public reprimand, as he pulled out the final chair and joined the table.

“Mom, they had actual Fan Kuan scrolls,” Huan said instead, his voice excited. This was an emotion until that very moment that Lin was unaware her nephew even possessed. “A full exhibit on Song dynasty landscapes.”

“I told you, the Republic City Museum of Art is very advanced.”

Lin scoffed softly into her water glass.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Suyin said sarcastically, “I forgot you have opinions on the matter.”

“I just believe the Azulon Gallery of Art has a far better collection overall than the RCMA.”

“Well forgive me if I discount the museum that curated most of its collection through the colonization and pillaging of Earth Kingdom villages.”

Lin rolled her eyes. “Says the woman who colonized a fertile farming valley to build her exclusive dream city.”

Su ignored her and turned back to her son. “Did you do any sketches while you were at the museum, Huan?”

He nodded and pulled a hardbound sketchbook out of his robes, which he passed over to her. Su opened it and looked through; Lin couldn’t help but look, too. Her nephew was a much messier sketcher than she, but had a loose style that suited the objects that caught his eye.

“He does studies,” Su informed her happily, angling the pages of Huan’s sketchbook toward her. “You should take him around the city, Lin. You used to know all the best places to paint. Do you still watercolor?”

“I do,” Lin said slowly, then looked over at Huan carefully. She gestured at the sketchbook. “May I?”

He nodded and she took it, flipping through the pages. There were several studies of paintings, but most of sculpture, with notes about proportions and colors. Sketches of faces and poses littered a single page, where Huan had clearly drawn passersby. Lin had never been to art school, but she knew the hallmarks of an arts education when she saw one. She was certain her little sister had paid a very large sum of money for a private mentor for her son at the very least.

“Lin used to watercolor with Uncle Aang all the time. She was good then, and I’m sure you’ve gotten even better. Haven’t you, Lin?”

The older woman scoffed and snapped Huan’s sketchbook closed. “Hardly.” She passed it over to Su, who handed it back to Huan.

“You really should take him out, Lin,” Su said to her as their waiter approached.

“I do have a job, you know,” Lin grumbled, painfully aware of the hurt in Opal’s eyes from across the table. Once again, Su seemed to be favoring her other children over Opal, something Lin wanted no part of. Huan, seemingly disinterred, slipped the sketchbook in his robes and focused on the menu instead…but for the rest of the meal, she saw him considering her thoughtfully.

-/-

Lin had to admit, for as ostentatious as Zaofu was, Su’s husband was one hell of an architect. The city they had designed was gorgeous, and made for excellent sketching.

She’d been here almost a week, on mandatory Saikhan-induced vacation, and she’d escaped the stifling oppression of the matriarchal household to go out amongst the city. People didn’t know her here, disguised as she was in Zaofu robes, and she was free to wander the city as she pleased. She wandered for most of the day with her pencils and sketchbook and little travel watercolor tin, getting lost amongst the organically winding streets and sketching the twisting spires, the lush parks, the sparkling metal and glass as she went. Every once and awhile, she’d like a sketch enough to try to get the colors right in paint.

She was only marginally successful, and it kept driving her out to continue to sketch. One day, somehow, she would be able to capture this infuriating city the way she was able to capture her own. And maybe then the city Su had built would finally start to make sense.

She only had two days left of her visit, and she had left the hardest building for last.

The train station.

It was similar to Republic City’s but different enough to pose a challenge all on its own. She sketched it from various different angles, trying to find one that would work best for her needs. 

Huan found her there, her sleeves pinned back by metal ties, carefully brushing silver-gray paint over her pencil marks.

“Hello, Aunt Lin,” he said simply, then sat beside her on the statue plinth without being invited.

She ignored him. She merely dipped her brush back into her water container, then spread the wet brush across the page and chased it with grey paint. She didn’t know why Huan was here, or what he wanted—probably he’d been sent to find her, as she’d been gone from Su’s house for most of three hours.

Huan shifted beside her, and she heard the rustle of pages and the quiet shush of pencils rattling together in a pencil case. As her paint dried, she looked over and found him sketching beside her. It was fast, bold strokes in a dark pencil, the soft graphite slashing across the page as he roughed out the outline of the face of her mother’s statue. Once he was satisfied, he began smudging with his pinky.

His technique compelled her to speak. “Sketching with a 4B?”

He shrugged nonchalantly. “I wanted to practice shadows.”

She turned back to her own watercolor and found that it had dried enough that she could paint again. She carefully inked in the darkness brought by the afternoon sun. “Most use charcoal for shadow studies.”

“Not me.”

Lin glanced over, and saw he had turned to a new page, had selected a lighter pencil, and was blocking out the full alcove in which Toph’s statue held the symbol of the Metal clan aloft.

Lin washed out her brush and switched to a finer one for details. What did he want from sketching buildings alongside her?

“I thought you were a sculptor.”

“I find it useful to inform my work through other media.” He held out his thumb to measure out the proportions of the statue inside the alcove, then scribbled a note next to his drawing before continuing his sketch. “Don’t you?”

Lin supposed so, although her watercolors didn’t necessarily inform her work as Chief of Police. But her frequent forays into areas she rarely went to find things she had not yet painted helped her keep tabs on her city. So in a way, they did. She hadn’t thought about it like that.

She didn’t respond, though, just washed yellow and orange into parts of the metal facade to demonstrate the effects of the setting sun.

Huan, to his credit, didn’t speak further, only scribbled in his sketchbook. Lin was grateful; she wasn’t sure what higher power had blessed her with not one but three introverted niblings, but she’d take it. Wing and Wei were enough on their own, and combined with Su they were downright overwhelming. Huan, though, was quiet for the most part, definitely his father’s son with a healthy dash of the Beifong individualist streak thrown in for good measure.

Lin had decided, now that she’d spent a week around him, that he wasn’t so bad. None of them were, really. Su had managed to raise five pretty great kids, a fact which still shocked her. Even Bataar Jr., whom she had spent the least amount of time around—seemed alright, although a bit bogged down in his father’s shadow.

That, Lin thought with a smirk, was becoming a family tradition.

Eventually her painting reached the point where she could do no more, so she reached into her pockets and sorted through her pens as the paper dried enough for her to ink in the final lines. Huan was slowly and methodically shading his sketch of the statue and the alcove with an array of graphite pencils and a blending nub.

She watched for a moment as he worked, then turned back to her own piece and carefully started to ink in the details.

She finished about the same time as her nephew, and he glances curiously at her sketchbook. She passed it over; he exchanged his with hers, and stared at her watercolor for several long moments, glancing between it and the building of study.

“Mom was right,” he said simply, and carefully handed it back to her. “You’re very good.”

She glanced down at Huan’s shading exercise and was startled for a moment by what she saw. She rarely saw or understood the comparisons people made between herself and Toph but somehow the way Huan had shaded the statue allowed her to see her own pointed chin and sharp cheekbones in her mother’s face. The more she stared, the more she saw Toph, but she couldn’t shake that first impression.

She swallowed and quickly passed his sketchbook back without comment.

He smiled softly and tucked it carefully away. As he collected up his pencils he said quietly, “Thank you for letting me sketch with you, Aunt Lin.”

She looked over at him, hesitated with a sharp comment about his self-invitation in the back of her throat, then stopped. She decided, for once, to go a different course instead. She reached for her watercolors and blotted the pallet dry with a bit more force than necessary. “Don’t mention it, kid.”

-/-

“No, no, no! Lift me higher! We have to make sure every door has a lantern!”

Lin exchanged a pained look over the table with Huan at Ikki’s demanding screech, and he grimaced in return.

They were both crammed into Katara’s old study, which now functioned as a general library for the island. With the temple full of acolytes, new airbenders coming and going constantly for training and with reports, Mako and Bolin and Asami in and out, and now Su’s family taking up temporary residence in the family guest quarters, there weren’t many places to escape from the hubbub.

Lin could have gone home, but she would never hear the end of it from her sister, let alone Kya and her siblings. So she had escaped to Katara’s old office, just for a moment, desperate for solace… and found that Huan had similar ideas.

Huan had looked at her, nodded, and pulled his things off the extra chair at the one and only table in the room. Lin had pulled a book off the shelves at random and sat. They’d gotten maybe ten minutes of silence before they’d heard the chatter of voices in the hallway and Ikki had started issuing decoration orders like a military dictation.

Lin was just wondering if she could lock the door with her bending to keep them out when it slammed open to reveal Tenzin’s daughter and a handful of harried looking acolytes.

“Oh, hi Huan! Lin! We’re just decorating the island for the winter solstice, don’t mind us!”

Ikki blew into the room like the small tornado she was and immediately started issuing orders. Huan cringed and sunk back into his chair. Lin wrinkled her nose and closed with book.

“Want to get out of here, kid?”

He glanced at her, green eyes questioning.

Lin pulled her Satombile keys out of her pockets and shook them. “Kiyoshi Museum’s dead this time of year.”

Huan smiled and nodded, and together they made their escape.

…Or they would have, if Su hadn’t waylaid them in the courtyard.

“Where are you two off to?” she asked.

“Mind your own business,” Lin growled childishly just as Huan said, “Just the Kyoshi Museum.”

She glanced at him and he grimaced apologetically. Clearly, Huan had never learned to lie to his parents. Given the fact Su had harbored a criminal masquerading as a human lie detector machine, that made sense. Still, it made it annoying.

Thankfully, Su lit up at the mention of the Kyoshi Museum, either oblivious to the exchange or more likely, not caring. “Oh that’s wonderful! Thanks for showing him around, Lin. You’ll love the Kyoshi Museum, Huan, it’s got beautiful poetry scrolls on display about her Avatar adventures. Are you two going to paint?”

“Sure,” Lin lied, because she would do whatever she could to get Su out of her hair and off of her fried nerves.

“Well I can’t wait to see,” she told them with a smile. “I have to go pry my husband out of Tenzin’s study. I hope Asami comes around like she said she would so I can get him to think about something that isn’t the funicular station. Knowing my luck, they’ll just talk schematics. Oh well, it will make him happy.”

Lin blinked at the barrage of words. She still wasn’t used to how much Su talked.

“Anyway, I’m rambling,” Su continued airily. “I’m off. Have fun, you two!” 

And then she disappeared as quickly as she appeared.

As soon as she was gone, Huan peered curiously at his aunt. “Are we going to paint?”

Lin shrugged. “Do what you want.”

“I only have my pencils.”

“Then you can draw.”

She started off across the plaza for the stairs to the harbor and he scrambled after her. He was taller, but she walked faster. Soon they were across on the ferry and sliding into Lin’s Satomobile. The Museum District wasn’t one Lin frequented often, but her RCPD plates meant they could park anywhere despite the fact the streets were clogged with people and pedestrians.

She collected her watercolor set and travel brushes from the trunk, where she had put them weeks ago but never gotten out again, and together they walked the few blocks to the museum. Despite the popularity of the street, the Kyoshi Museum was fairly quiet. Lin pulled out her wallet and paid the ticket fee while Huan buried his nose in the Museum map.

“Is there a recommended tour pattern?” he asked the woman behind the desk as Lin finished up the transaction, and she stood off to the side as the woman drew her preferred method of exploration on his map for him.

They toured through the fan room, the scroll room. There were a few other patrons, but mostly they had the place to themselves. Nothing really spoke to Lin, as she had seen most of it before, but Huan stood for a long time in front of the sculpture of Kyoshi and her partner, Rangi, in the room dedicated to their life together. He stood for so long that Lin sat on the bench in the middle of the room and unpacked her watercolors and sketchbook, opening up to a clean page.

He turned around and looked at her, shocked. “Here?”

“As good a place as any.”

He hesitated in front of the statue, then came and sat beside her. Lin sketched out the tapestry on the wall depicting Ragni and Kyoshi’s wedding, then freehanded the carefully preserved wedding qun kwa and matching kimono that rested delicately on the dress forms. She was awful at depicting cloth (it was partially the reason why she tended to stick with architecture) but she got out her watercolors anyway. She used her watercolor pen to carefully brush greens, reds, golds, and blacks across the page.

Huan sat cross-legged on the bench beside her, scribbling quietly. Lin glanced at his page and saw a few proportions studies, a few half-sketched out faces, and comments beside them in handwriting too cramped for her to make out. Whatever he was working on now was on the opposite page, out of her sight range.

Whatever he was working on, he wasn’t happy with it. Just like she wasn’t happy with her own efforts.

Finally he frowned and closed his sketchbook with a sigh. “Let’s move on.”

She nodded and packed up her paints without any further comment.


	2. Chapter 2

Huan wasn’t surprised when his aunt wandered through his studio about two hours after his mother’s birthday party got fully underway. Frankly, he was surprised she had lasted that long. He had tapped out an hour earlier and had come down to recharge. The fact she had come to the lower terraces was also not surprising; the upper houses and the guest houses were crawling with his mother’s guests, and he was certain she was craving quiet just like he was.

Since she had shown up in Zaofu with the Avatar, Huan had discovered they were very similar people, himself and his Aunt Lin. It had­­­n’t happened all at once, but now after almost two and a half years of interacting with her, he was fairly certain Aunt Lin was his favorite person in the family outside of Opal.

Huan was self-aware enough to know that his deep introversion and quick-to-flare temper made him abrasive, and his impassioned love for the art world made him pretentious.

Aunt Lin didn't care.

In fact, Aunt Lin hated crowds as much as he did, preferred painting to people, and had an appreciation for the finer things in life that he could definitely appreciate. All the stories his mom had told of Aunt Lin made her seem like some sort of hard-nosed, warrior jock, but in reality she was just like him. Her dry wit and sarcastic comments made him smile, and although he’d never say it out loud, he always sided with her with she and his mom went at it.

Besides, Aunt Lin was one of the only people who actually seemed to _like_ his art. Which was, you know a big plus.

It was certainly never boring when she was around. After the second or third time she’d come to visit, and after they’d gone to visit her, sketching with Aunt Lin had become almost mandatory. Huan wasn’t a sketcher by nature, but he enjoyed his quiet sojourns with his aunt to Zaofu’s parks, Republic City’s museums, and to all the little hidden places on Air Temple Island and the Beifong Estate.

She rarely came here though.

So when he felt her enter the studio–she walked heavily, and his senses were more sensitive than his siblings, so he could always feel her coming before they could—he turned, nodded in greeting, then turned back to the statue he had been working on for the past two and a half weeks.

Aunt Lin stopped just behind him, and he heard the quiet 'shink' of metal as she crossed her arms over her chest and her metal braces brushed again.

Silence passed between them, broken only by the distant sounds of the party above.

Huan ignored it, and his Aunt’s quiet presence, and finally reached for his metalbending. He grabbed the top tendril and _twisted_ until it rose and spun up into the air like the backwards arc of a cherry blossom.

“That’s new."

“I’m in a plant phase.”

Aunt Lin cast her eyes around his studio and took in all the statues he had created since her last visit. “I thought you were doing pieces based on the built environment?”

He rolled his eyes. “Buildings are pedestrian.”

“Oh, thank you for that,” she snarked back, and he grinned. Most of her paintings were of buildings.

She huffed in clear indication she knew he was teasing her, and stuck her hands in the pockets of her robes to walk among his current works. She inspected each of them, appraising their twists and turns with a discerning eye.

“What’s this one, then?”

He turned and saw her standing in front of the one he had just finished a week before her arrival. “When I visited Republic City I was struck by the symbiotic relationship between the city, the Spirits, and the vines. I created that piece to investigate the nexus point between city, spirit, and flora.”

“It feels more parasitic at the moment,” Aunt Lin said with a dry little smile, but he watched as she ran a finger along the tendrils wrapped round a large, empty orb. Then nodded in approval. “Why the sudden interest in organics?”

He shrugged. “I’ve also been painting.”

She peered over at him curiously. “Have you?”

He nodded, and tipped his head back towards the interior of his studio. Lin followed him inside, and after he turned on the soft overhead lights, he showed her his canvasses of thick oil paints, and multimedia pieces where he had mixed ink and metal shavings, soaked fabric in the mixture then warped the canvas into spikes and tendrils while still in a frame.

“I thought—well, we haven’t seen Grandma Toph in a while, but—”

Lin stiffened at the mention of her mother’s name, and he stopped talking.

Mom never stopped talking about her mother, his grandmother, but he hadn’t been quite clear as to the extent of the grudge between them.

Apparently it was deep.

He moved on. 

Instead of going into depth on his paintings, he handed her his sketchbook for her to look through, which very much felt like submitting to a professor for inspection. She flipped through his charcoal and graphite sketches, squinted to read the notes for the brainstorming sessions for new pieces, and paused for a long time on the pages where he had experimented with watercolors.

Huan squirmed.

He hadn’t her talent for shading in paint, the ability to mix to match colors exactly to what he saw in real life, but he thought he had done respectably. He was nowhere as skilled as her, but he figured that was the three decades of practice she had over him.

“What watercolor pallet are you using?” she finally asked. 

He went over to his desk and picked up the pallet, which he handed to her. She inspected the tin, then flipped it over and read the back.

“If you intend to continue with watercolors, you’ll want a Shitao set,” she said finally, handing both the pallet and his sketchbook, “and sable-beaver brushes. The pigments are richer, and you’ll have more control with sable-beaver.”

He took them back with a murmured word of thanks.

She inclined her head and went back to his canvases. “For how long did you soak these before bending the fibers?”

He brightened, set his sketchbook aside, and told her.

.

.

.

A month later, a package arrived for him from Republic City. The parcel was tied snugly in place by twine and stamped shut with the Beifong family seal. He popped the wax and unwrapped the thick paper to find a small tin of Shitao watercolors, a set of sable-beaver brushes, and a note tucked into a sketchbook of high quality watercolor paper.

_“These will suit you better than the Yang’s.  
Best,  
–Lin”_

Huan smiled to himself, and went to find a cup for water.   


**Author's Note:**

> If you like what you read, I always love reviews :) Part 2 will be posted just as soon as I write it!


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